Which of the couple dozen passwords I have for various places do you suggest I change frequently? All of them? I've never had my accounts cracked yet, and for any of them except banking (who use more than just a password) I don't care if they do. On the other hand, I've lost count of the times that I had to waste half an hour because I had forgotten the new password because some moronic policy forced me to change it.
I really, really don't think so. Different tools for different jobs - a language for writing reliable infrastructure should look very very different from a language for exploration of datasets, for example - the first one must place emphasis on reliability and performance, the second on flexibility. Eg adding members to data structures on the fly is a great idea in the second case, but not in the first.
Sure you can try to sweep that under 'different paradigms', and indeed you could mix two arbitrary languages in the same file using some delimited blocks for example, and call it 'one language with different paradigms', but why would you want to? The convoluted multi-paradigm monstrosity that is C++ is a terrible example to us all there, in my opinion.
I think instead the shape of the future will be more like all those different languages that compile on the JVM - jython, Scala, Lua, and whatnot. They compile into interoperable modules without extra hassle, so in each module you can use the right tool for the job at hand.
I don't consider myself competent to judge what 'contributing meaningfully to society' means, as I've never met 'the society', just people. I don't think the concept of 'society' as something you can contribute to, or not, has any meaning - there are people, and small cohesive groups of people, each with their own interests. As long as one doesn't go out of one's way to harm people, and does some good to some, and be it only one's own family, I consider it a life well lived - anything beyond that is impossible to judge by an outside observer. No concept of society is necessary or useful for any of this.
By implication, I consider 'public good' to be an equally null concept, and my definition of 'an honest living' has been given above...
The purpose of the stock market is to allow companies to raise outside capital from many investors in a flexible manner. That's the only 'purpose' of it, to the extent that it has one (stock markets were not designed by a grand planner, like most social institutions they just evolved). 'Worthiness of social ventures' never was anywhere in there, that kind of stuff is only ever said by academic economists (and academic economics has way less relevance to modern finance than, say, engineering does).
Can you define 'honest living' and 'society' by the way? To me these sound like they can mean pretty much anything. The only clearly 'non-honest' living is actually hurting other people - can you explain how high-frequency traders do that? Or does the fact that you personally don't see any 'social porpose' to what they're doing mean it's a despicable occupation?
As long as copyright gets extended effectively into pertpetuity, and as long as the law at the very least doesn't punish, and often actively supports, schemes that prevent me from exercising fair use rights on content I paid for (not to mention being force-feeding me insulting propaganda clips before alowing me to watch a movie I bought) - yes, copyright has no moral standing and should not be respected.
FYI not currently a linux user, and as for self-righteous - pot.kettle.black.
People have raised families in this fashion for centuries, and it worked out just fine, arguably a lot better than for example sticking kids into a creche or kindergarten or some such official institution. At least I know I'd rather have grown up in an outsized family.
'Effects of neglect' indeed - how do you know? Or is it just bad because that's not what *you* think is normal?
When I was 4-5 years old, my parents trusted me enough to leave me alone at home when they went to work, because I hated fucking kindergarten (didn't see why the adults in kindergarten could order me around). I'm sure idiots like you have already made this illegal in places like the US, and all I can say is when I have kids (soon), I'll just have to move to a country that leaves parenting to the parents.
I can't be bothered to setup filters, labels, whatever, since gmail is my secondary account I spend about 5mins/day on (primary is work, which blocks gmail).
So gmail doing some basic filtering for me based on my past behavior is an awesome feature I look forward to.
That's so wrong I don't know where to begin. There are all sorts of cool things you can only do now around programming that were either a pain or impossible a couple of decades ago. To take your example, rather than wasting my time on just getting the computer to plot a graph, I can focus on right away producing some graphs of really interesting data (that I can get live off the web with another 6 lines of code).
Or take Lego Mindstorms - build robots, program them, then call those programs via your cell phone - that can be pretty cool if you're 10. Or take StarLogo - with short canned scripts you can simulate whole antheaps, tweak a few parameters and see how the emergent dynamics change.
Those are on the purely elementary level, if one is willing to put more time into it the scope becomes pretty much unlimited (using the Emotiv mind reading helmet to control that Lego robot, for example, and while we're at it let's attach a real laser to it;) )
These days, you can go straight away to doing cool stuff with programming - the only reason it might seem boring is if you got a shit teacher!
You think you might lose your _marriage_ because you're fired and broke? I woudn't think that kind of marriage is worth keeping (and before you ask, yes I'm married, for over 13 years).
And of course you only walk away from a paycheck once you got another one lined up - if your boss is a moron, they won't notice you're looking around. I'm speaking from happy experience there - after a pretty good boss walked out, his replacement was an asshole - and after 3 months of intense interviewing (while still being employed of course), I went on to a much, much better job.
Seriously, if you let your boss terrorize you, you only got yourself to blame.
A review by one's peers, ie by people of comparable standing (training, abilities) to oneself. It's not trivial to define that group in any particular case, but it's certainly smaller than 'everybody'. And no, being a scientist doesn't imply having to provide and defend your data and conclusions to anyone who asks, otherwise one would never get around to doing the actual research. http://despair.com/cluelessness.html
Well, also I'm one of those people to whom 'having fun online' is impossible or meaningless. A conversation without hearing the actual voice to me loses so much substance that it's basically not worth having unless it's purely for information exchange, and phone calls are better but still a mile behind being there. Sure, exchanging a ping-like sms or email with friends on different continents, like once a year, is OK - but 'fun online' to me is such a weak substitute for actually seeing the person that I'd rather focus on the situation I'm physically in at the moment.
Maybe your friends are so incredibly interesting, or maybe your standard for interesting things in your inbox is low - sure, I get sent stuff as well, but 95% of that I'd just as well do without.
No, it's exactly the same. 'Science hasn't shown conclusively' is another expression for 'Within limits of current knowledge, no harmful effects have been proven', which puts it right into the 'pretty harmless' category, at least if you want your laws to be evidence-based. And if you don't, you might as well sprinkle gold-dust on your lawn to deter the man-eating tigers, as 'it hasn't been proven that this is useless, so it _might_ be vital'.
I was driving AT only in the US for a while, then came over to the UK and had to learn (and pass a pretty strict test) to drive MT cars; and I come down firmly on the AT side. If you actually _care_ about what's going on inside your car, fine, probably manual is for you. All I care about is getting from A to B, and for that, the UI of manual transmission is perfect - press brake to go slower, press gas to go faster, change 'gears' to go back or go into park, and that's all folks.
I'm the first to admit my driving skills are about average, and I plan to keep them that way. On the other hand, my wife can drive really well, and while she prefers MT, she tells me that the recent AT cars she's driven behaved well enough that she can't find good objective arguments for using MT anymore.
That's what the compliance department is for. If in doubt, escalate to them, and they're not in the same command chain as your boss at all, and their only job is to see that nothing fishy is going on, and they have the clout to do something about it. Big financial firms (I work in one) take this stuff really really seriously.
I'm 35, and so far can honestly say the life only gets better as you get older, at least if you invest enough ongoing effort in learning stuff and making something of yourself. I was a full-scale nerd at school and uni, hardly went out, but now thanks to the effort I put in over those years got a great job, quite enough dough, all the hardware I want, a great wife, and lately beginning to explore nightlife in earnest - just got into death metal and drone metal since this summer ( check out Sunn o))), they're awesome, and I'm going to see Rammstein tomorrow)
From my perspective, getting older means nobody can tell you what to do anymore, so you can have exactly as much fun as you want. Yes, you got to earn your way, but that's not exactly hard if you got any skills at all, and makes it more real to boot. Plus you get more experience in how to interact with people, which makes _that_ part more fun, too.
Anybody telling you adult life sucks is probably just doing it to themselves, is my guess.
BTW, you can just download svn and create a local repo on disk (one mouseclick if you're using tortoisesvn), and off you go - no need for a source control server; and I have a feeling that svn's power for supporting reverting (eg only revert commit 57, but not what came before or after it) and merging, etc is rather better than what OO offers - but I agree that otherwise from what you say, OO seems to be almost as good as good ol' LaTeX.
When it gets an outline mode to match Word's (I use that a lot for organizing my ideas), I might actually start using it...
Hmm, in my book anybody who uses that kind of thing for a thesis is a masochist.
For anything beyond causal word processing (say beyond 20 pages and 3 revisions) LaTeX gives you so much more: - it's text based so you can use source control such as svn to track and merge revisions; - style is orthogonal to content so you can change them independently (I had produced two versions of my thesis, one in the horrible university-required format, another quite nice-looking (http://egor.ch/thesis/), by commenting a couple of lines in the header); - it gives you as much or as little control as you want - you can just specify \chapter etc and let it do the formatting, or you can control the position of every dot on every page if desired. - You mentioned thousands of formulas? All typeset in a WYSIWYG tool? Why would you do that to yourself?
Word and OpenOffice are IMO both fine for typing up a letter on the quick, but that's about it.
Once I realized in my last job that I wanted out, I just shifted priorities. No matter how hard they try to push you, if you only care about _appearing_ to do your best in your present position, that takes much less effort, and leaves enough energy free to jobhunt aggressively. It's still tough, but eminently doable.
Yup, agree completely. As cute as some iPhone functionality is, I've heard enough bad press about how Apple handles its developers (and had enough bad experiences of my own with an iPod earlier), that there's no way in hell I'm buying one. Thanks goodness the Nokia n900 is coming out - in spite of all the rough edges I'm sure it'll have, that's the one I'm going for (and me wife is getting one too;) ). And I'm not alone in that among my friends, either.
Where did 'beset by nightmares' come from? How about dying a wealthy, happy banker who will quickly fade into obscurity after his death? I'd go for that, personally.
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Which of the couple dozen passwords I have for various places do you suggest I change frequently? All of them? I've never had my accounts cracked yet, and for any of them except banking (who use more than just a password) I don't care if they do. On the other hand, I've lost count of the times that I had to waste half an hour because I had forgotten the new password because some moronic policy forced me to change it.
I really, really don't think so. Different tools for different jobs - a language for writing reliable infrastructure should look very very different from a language for exploration of datasets, for example - the first one must place emphasis on reliability and performance, the second on flexibility. Eg adding members to data structures on the fly is a great idea in the second case, but not in the first.
Sure you can try to sweep that under 'different paradigms', and indeed you could mix two arbitrary languages in the same file using some delimited blocks for example, and call it 'one language with different paradigms', but why would you want to? The convoluted multi-paradigm monstrosity that is C++ is a terrible example to us all there, in my opinion.
I think instead the shape of the future will be more like all those different languages that compile on the JVM - jython, Scala, Lua, and whatnot. They compile into interoperable modules without extra hassle, so in each module you can use the right tool for the job at hand.
Heh, good one.
I don't consider myself competent to judge what 'contributing meaningfully to society' means, as I've never met 'the society', just people. I don't think the concept of 'society' as something you can contribute to, or not, has any meaning - there are people, and small cohesive groups of people, each with their own interests. As long as one doesn't go out of one's way to harm people, and does some good to some, and be it only one's own family, I consider it a life well lived - anything beyond that is impossible to judge by an outside observer. No concept of society is necessary or useful for any of this.
By implication, I consider 'public good' to be an equally null concept, and my definition of 'an honest living' has been given above...
The purpose of the stock market is to allow companies to raise outside capital from many investors in a flexible manner. That's the only 'purpose' of it, to the extent that it has one (stock markets were not designed by a grand planner, like most social institutions they just evolved). 'Worthiness of social ventures' never was anywhere in there, that kind of stuff is only ever said by academic economists (and academic economics has way less relevance to modern finance than, say, engineering does).
Can you define 'honest living' and 'society' by the way? To me these sound like they can mean pretty much anything. The only clearly 'non-honest' living is actually hurting other people - can you explain how high-frequency traders do that? Or does the fact that you personally don't see any 'social porpose' to what they're doing mean it's a despicable occupation?
As long as copyright gets extended effectively into pertpetuity, and as long as the law at the very least doesn't punish, and often actively supports, schemes that prevent me from exercising fair use rights on content I paid for (not to mention being force-feeding me insulting propaganda clips before alowing me to watch a movie I bought) - yes, copyright has no moral standing and should not be respected.
FYI not currently a linux user, and as for self-righteous - pot.kettle.black.
People have raised families in this fashion for centuries, and it worked out just fine, arguably a lot better than for example sticking kids into a creche or kindergarten or some such official institution. At least I know I'd rather have grown up in an outsized family.
'Effects of neglect' indeed - how do you know? Or is it just bad because that's not what *you* think is normal?
When I was 4-5 years old, my parents trusted me enough to leave me alone at home when they went to work, because I hated fucking kindergarten (didn't see why the adults in kindergarten could order me around). I'm sure idiots like you have already made this illegal in places like the US, and all I can say is when I have kids (soon), I'll just have to move to a country that leaves parenting to the parents.
I can't be bothered to setup filters, labels, whatever, since gmail is my secondary account I spend about 5mins/day on (primary is work, which blocks gmail).
So gmail doing some basic filtering for me based on my past behavior is an awesome feature I look forward to.
That's so wrong I don't know where to begin. There are all sorts of cool things you can only do now around programming that were either a pain or impossible a couple of decades ago. To take your example, rather than wasting my time on just getting the computer to plot a graph, I can focus on right away producing some graphs of really interesting data (that I can get live off the web with another 6 lines of code).
;) )
Or take Lego Mindstorms - build robots, program them, then call those programs via your cell phone - that can be pretty cool if you're 10. Or take StarLogo - with short canned scripts you can simulate whole antheaps, tweak a few parameters and see how the emergent dynamics change.
Those are on the purely elementary level, if one is willing to put more time into it the scope becomes pretty much unlimited (using the Emotiv mind reading helmet to control that Lego robot, for example, and while we're at it let's attach a real laser to it
These days, you can go straight away to doing cool stuff with programming - the only reason it might seem boring is if you got a shit teacher!
You think you might lose your _marriage_ because you're fired and broke? I woudn't think that kind of marriage is worth keeping (and before you ask, yes I'm married, for over 13 years).
And of course you only walk away from a paycheck once you got another one lined up - if your boss is a moron, they won't notice you're looking around. I'm speaking from happy experience there - after a pretty good boss walked out, his replacement was an asshole - and after 3 months of intense interviewing (while still being employed of course), I went on to a much, much better job.
Seriously, if you let your boss terrorize you, you only got yourself to blame.
A review by one's peers, ie by people of comparable standing (training, abilities) to oneself. It's not trivial to define that group in any particular case, but it's certainly smaller than 'everybody'. And no, being a scientist doesn't imply having to provide and defend your data and conclusions to anyone who asks, otherwise one would never get around to doing the actual research. http://despair.com/cluelessness.html
Well, also I'm one of those people to whom 'having fun online' is impossible or meaningless. A conversation without hearing the actual voice to me loses so much substance that it's basically not worth having unless it's purely for information exchange, and phone calls are better but still a mile behind being there. Sure, exchanging a ping-like sms or email with friends on different continents, like once a year, is OK - but 'fun online' to me is such a weak substitute for actually seeing the person that I'd rather focus on the situation I'm physically in at the moment.
Maybe your friends are so incredibly interesting, or maybe your standard for interesting things in your inbox is low - sure, I get sent stuff as well, but 95% of that I'd just as well do without.
No, it's exactly the same. 'Science hasn't shown conclusively' is another expression for 'Within limits of current knowledge, no harmful effects have been proven', which puts it right into the 'pretty harmless' category, at least if you want your laws to be evidence-based. And if you don't, you might as well sprinkle gold-dust on your lawn to deter the man-eating tigers, as 'it hasn't been proven that this is useless, so it _might_ be vital'.
And this would be different to the current state of Facebook how?
I was driving AT only in the US for a while, then came over to the UK and had to learn (and pass a pretty strict test) to drive MT cars; and I come down firmly on the AT side. If you actually _care_ about what's going on inside your car, fine, probably manual is for you. All I care about is getting from A to B, and for that, the UI of manual transmission is perfect - press brake to go slower, press gas to go faster, change 'gears' to go back or go into park, and that's all folks.
I'm the first to admit my driving skills are about average, and I plan to keep them that way. On the other hand, my wife can drive really well, and while she prefers MT, she tells me that the recent AT cars she's driven behaved well enough that she can't find good objective arguments for using MT anymore.
Yes, but I too would rather give it to someone who is not Apple.
That's what the compliance department is for. If in doubt, escalate to them, and they're not in the same command chain as your boss at all, and their only job is to see that nothing fishy is going on, and they have the clout to do something about it. Big financial firms (I work in one) take this stuff really really seriously.
Erm, 'das' is neutral gender, male would be 'der Fuhrer'. So if you become Das Fuhrer, you can have your own harem of women that you have no use for?
I'm 35, and so far can honestly say the life only gets better as you get older, at least if you invest enough ongoing effort in learning stuff and making something of yourself. I was a full-scale nerd at school and uni, hardly went out, but now thanks to the effort I put in over those years got a great job, quite enough dough, all the hardware I want, a great wife, and lately beginning to explore nightlife in earnest - just got into death metal and drone metal since this summer ( check out Sunn o))), they're awesome, and I'm going to see Rammstein tomorrow)
From my perspective, getting older means nobody can tell you what to do anymore, so you can have exactly as much fun as you want. Yes, you got to earn your way, but that's not exactly hard if you got any skills at all, and makes it more real to boot. Plus you get more experience in how to interact with people, which makes _that_ part more fun, too.
Anybody telling you adult life sucks is probably just doing it to themselves, is my guess.
Heh, time does move on it seems ;)
BTW, you can just download svn and create a local repo on disk (one mouseclick if you're using tortoisesvn), and off you go - no need for a source control server; and I have a feeling that svn's power for supporting reverting (eg only revert commit 57, but not what came before or after it) and merging, etc is rather better than what OO offers - but I agree that otherwise from what you say, OO seems to be almost as good as good ol' LaTeX.
When it gets an outline mode to match Word's (I use that a lot for organizing my ideas), I might actually start using it...
Hmm, in my book anybody who uses that kind of thing for a thesis is a masochist.
For anything beyond causal word processing (say beyond 20 pages and 3 revisions) LaTeX gives you so much more:
- it's text based so you can use source control such as svn to track and merge revisions;
- style is orthogonal to content so you can change them independently (I had produced two versions of my thesis, one in the horrible university-required format, another quite nice-looking (http://egor.ch/thesis/), by commenting a couple of lines in the header);
- it gives you as much or as little control as you want - you can just specify \chapter etc and let it do the formatting, or you can control the position of every dot on every page if desired.
- You mentioned thousands of formulas? All typeset in a WYSIWYG tool? Why would you do that to yourself?
Word and OpenOffice are IMO both fine for typing up a letter on the quick, but that's about it.
Once I realized in my last job that I wanted out, I just shifted priorities. No matter how hard they try to push you, if you only care about _appearing_ to do your best in your present position, that takes much less effort, and leaves enough energy free to jobhunt aggressively. It's still tough, but eminently doable.
I'm getting it first chance I can.
Yup, agree completely. As cute as some iPhone functionality is, I've heard enough bad press about how Apple handles its developers (and had enough bad experiences of my own with an iPod earlier), that there's no way in hell I'm buying one. Thanks goodness the Nokia n900 is coming out - in spite of all the rough edges I'm sure it'll have, that's the one I'm going for (and me wife is getting one too;) ). And I'm not alone in that among my friends, either.
Where did 'beset by nightmares' come from? How about dying a wealthy, happy banker who will quickly fade into obscurity after his death? I'd go for that, personally.